SEO Blog

There are occasions where you have something special to shout about. Perhaps you’re trying to get one up on the competition for Christmas searchers, maybe you’ve got a special sale coming up. Whatever it is, you will want to make sure that your pages are given prominence.

Search engine optimisation is simple enough in principle. You tell the search engines what your page is all about through keywords and then build authority for the page and terms. The more effective you are at doing this, the better your chances of getting to the top of Google.

However, when you have promotions that only last for a few weeks, how can you get your pages to rank for new keywords? We all know that pages with greater age are usually given greater prominence in the rankings, so already, if you are creating new content, you could be at a disadvantage. But don’t be perturbed, there’s plenty that you can do.

First of all you need to do some planning. What events are coming up? When is your website busiest and is there anything you can do to optimise this period? The earlier you are able to establish when you want to begin your SEO promotions, the sooner you can get on with implementation.

The ideal solution for any promotion is to have a new page or section within the website dedicated to it. This way you can focus all your efforts on optimising for the event in question without disrupting the focus of any existing page. It will also give visitors to the site a clear indication of where to go if arriving through other landing pages.

With a new page you can optimise it from top to toe. Get some wholly unique content uploaded, write the unique Meta and start building a linking profile. Obviously if it isn’t going to be around forever, or at least not visible, you don’t want to have too many permanent or paid links (not that you should anyway) coming in. For example, setting up a directory submission would be a little worthless.

Therefore commenting on blogs and forums or contributing to your own blog with related stories pointing towards the new content. All of this will build strength and prominence.

If you are looking to adjust your current framework, be sure to get a backup of the site before you make any drastic changes. Some of the more subtle edits that you can make include the Meta descriptions and elements of content. This will at least inform the search engines that the focus of the page has shifted slightly.

If you have a popular ecommerce store though, you don’t want to be chopping and changing your pages too much. Every time a new event comes up, producing a new dedicated page can be daunting. This is why creating a Christmas themed page, Easter page, Valentines page or any other kind of event that is significant in your market, just once can be beneficial. Optimise it in the background and simply release in good time before to allow the search engines to fully index it and gauge relevance. It can then be sidelined afterwards and brought out the next year again for a quick update.

Take, iwantoneofthose as a good example. This gift store provides a variety of different items from their website. They sit top of Google for Christmas gifts currently. There’s little chance that this will get them any traffic currently (for obvious reasons); however, a dedicated page sits almost out of sight within their website’s structure. This ensures that when the Christmas shopping season comes around, they will still be on top for a lucrative term “Christmas Gifts”.

When targeting events, times of the year or any other specific occurrence, you need to give it the same focus as your other SEO work. Seasonal and targeted traffic can give your site a much needed boost. You don’t need to go overboard, but the more work you do and the earlier it is complete, the better your chances of getting one up on the rest of your rivals.